John Foster Dulles invoked hemispheric principles against communism at the 1954 Pan-American conference while denouncing events in Guatemala. John F. Kennedy then defined the doctrine as opposition to a foreign power extending its reach into the hemisphere, citing the trade cutoff and work through the Organization of American States to isolate communist Cuba. The same logic appeared in United States military aid, intelligence support, Operation Condor, and the Nicaraguan Contras, and in a 1984 argument tentatively attributed to Robert Gates that nonintervention in Nicaragua would abandon the doctrine. What began as resistance to renewed European colonial intervention had become a rationale for keeping an ideology - and governments associated with it - out of the hemisphere.
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The Cold War turned exclusion into an ideological test
Cold War administrations expanded the doctrine from blocking foreign governments to opposing communist influence and revolution within the Americas.